Standard-Model (SM) hadronic parton showers initiated by secondary cosmic-ray production or dark matter (DM) annihilations robustly predict very low antinuclei yields and a strong additional suppression for heavier antinuclei. We show that an important exception can arise if DM annihilates into a confining dark sector that produces soft unclustered energy patterns (SUEPs). The hallmark of SUEPs is the emission of very large multiplicities of soft dark mesons (${\pi }_D$), which can overcome the usual phase-space suppression of antinuclei formation in parton showers, provided that the dark mesons decay promptly into SM quarks, i.e., within a SM hadronization length. We study several benchmark realizations and find that for DM masses $m_{\mathrm{DM}}\sim \mathcal{O}(10\mathrm{TeV})$, dark meson masses $m_{{\pi }_D}\sim 400\mathrm{GeV}$, ${\pi }_D$ dominantly decaying to $t\overline{t}$, and a SUEP temperature $T_{\mathrm{SUEP}}\simeq 0.1m_{\pi D}$, DM annihilation into SUEPs can yield tens of antideuterons and a few antihelium-3 events at $\mathsf{AMS-02}$ at kinetic energies of $\mathcal{O}(\mathrm{GeV}/\mathrm{n})$ and a few antideuterons and antihelium-3 events in $\mathsf{GAPS}$ at energies below $0.5\mathrm{GeV}/\mathrm{n}$. A future confirmation of an antinuclei signal by the $\mathsf{AMS-02}$ or $\mathsf{GAPS}$ experiments could provide hints for hidden confining dynamics and would significantly constrain the relevant SUEP parameters.

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• Particle astrophysics
• Particle dark matter
• Particle interactions
• Quantum chromodynamics